20th Century Furniture and Design
Furniture, lighting and objects of the 1900s, from Viennese workshops and the Bauhaus to moulded plastics, Memphis and computer-drawn forms.
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Between 1900 and 2000 furniture moved from the joiner's bench to the injection-moulding press. The early decades cleared away historical ornament: Charles Rennie Mackintosh in Glasgow and Josef Hoffmann in Vienna drew in straight lines and grids, and at the Bauhaus Marcel Breuer bent steel tube into his first club armchair (1925). Paris answered with the lacquer and rare veneers of Art Deco.
After 1945, wartime plywood, fibreglass and aluminium passed to designers such as Charles and Ray Eames, while Danish cabinetmakers and American craftsmen like Wendell Castle kept wood and handwork central. Gio Ponti's Superleggera chair (1957) and Eero Aarnio's Ball Chair (1963) show how widely those decades ranged. Memphis mocked good taste in the 1980s, and by the 1990s software drew shapes no workshop could. Materials often date a piece: inlay early, chromed tube between the wars, moulded shells after 1945, loud laminates in the 1980s.
Related artists
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